Devastated And Desperate
by Rasiaa
Summary: Eren's a painter- and he paints some rather morbid images, which he hides from his friends and sister in his private collection. But when someone asks a dangerous question that forces him to reveal those private works, it triggers some heartbreaking truths to arise from the ashes of a broken city.


_For those of you who might by chance happen to know me from some other fandom around here, you'd know I never, ever manage one shots this long. This killed me. Like really. Enjoy._

 _Also- Zoë_ _is actually Hange, but just kind of rewrote herself, so I let her do it, and changed her name when she became someone too different._

* * *

He honestly thought he'd outgrown this shit.

He jolts upward with a scream, scrambling in the confines of his bed sheets and then letting out a sob.

The blond boy looked devastated and desperate.

The picture flashes across his sight like it had in the dream, and the look on the young teen's face broke his heart.

He pulls his knees up to his chest and buries his face between them, his shoulders beginning to shake with the force of his cries.

…

Vaguely, he hears a key turning in the lock. Zoë is the only person beside himself who has a key, so unless he is about to be robbed, it is only she. He groans and turns over, pressing his face into the couch and stubbornly shutting his eyes. "Eren?" she calls, her footsteps making light clicking noises on his hardwood floor. "Eren, I swear to god, if you're asleep somewhere I'll kill you," he hears. Deciding to ignore her, he remains where he is.

He feels the ice-cold air hit his back a moment later as she rips the blanket off of him. "Ugh!" he groans, reaching for it blindly, but she smacks his hand and throws the soft fabric into the floor. "Give it back," he moans, collapsing into the couch in partial defeat. He hears her tsk above him.

"Honestly, Eren," she sighs. "You know we have plans today," she says tiredly, obviously resigned.

"We have plans Friday," he corrects, and pulls the pillow over his head. "Now go away," he demands into the pillow.

"Today is Friday," she informs him dryly.

Groaning in annoyance and exhaustion, he lifts his face and blearily opens his eyes to squint at her. "It's Wednesday," he says in confusion. Unless it isn't and he had slept through days again. It isn't that uncommon for him, actually. He could sleep for weeks at a time sometimes and wake up feeling like he had been falling.

Zoë sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. "Do you ever do anything normally?" she asks rhetorically.

"You should be used to it by now," he retorts, sitting up fully and rubbing his eyes.

"I am, but that doesn't mean it isn't exhausting to deal with you."

"How do you think I feel? I'm the one who sleeps for days."

She rolls her eyes and points to his bathroom. "Shower. Now. I want you dressed and in my car in an hour or I'm coming in there and dragging you outside naked so you could be arrested for public indecency."

Having already grabbed his towel from his linen closet and crossed the threshold of his bathroom, he rolls his eyes and sticks his tongue out childishly in her direction. "You are the very definition of public indecency," he informs her, and then slams the door before she can retaliate.

He hears her start to cuss him out but decides once again to ignore her. Having been best friends with her since they were in first grade, he is more than used to her atrocious manners and behavior. Instead, he turns the shower on and strips, leaning his hands on the sink while he waits for the water to heat up. He stares at himself in the mirror, feeling the familiar sensation of resigned tiredness wash over him.

Green eyes stare back at him from eye sockets lined with dark circles. His cheeks are sunken in, and his dark hair is dull and lifeless. His gaze travels downward, to his too obvious collarbone and then to his hairless chest and visible ribs. He is too thin and he knows it, but sometimes the thoughts running rampant in his head make him forget himself and he never remembers to eat, or sometimes to even sleep. There is no spark to him at all because of this, except in his words when he speaks to Zoë.

He sighs and steps into the shower, spotting lines of dirt on his neck and on the insides of his wrists and ankles. He is determined to wash it all away, but what he isn't sure about is whether he is washing the dirt on his skin or within it.

…

When he comes out of the shower with steam behind him, he finds Zoë digging through the box on the floor he had forgotten to hide away. His nakedness forgotten, panic laces through him and all thoughts of a night on the town vanish in a haze. "What are you doing?" he demands, racing over. She jumps and drops one of the canvases, which he reaches for and catches, spotting a glimpse of desperate, devastated, and terrified cornflower blue eyes before he hides it away in the box again. He faces her angrily, kicking the box behind him and out of sight. "What are you doing?"

She stutters. "I- well. Excuse me for being curious. You've been a painter for eleven years and I've seen only the work you've had in art shows. But they show progress every time and I waste at least fifteen hours a week with you buying paint supplies around the city, so you must be working on more than just those. Especially since I've watched you work, and those take no time at all. Countless pieces I know you've sold, but you can't have gotten rid of all of them, and now I've found the proof," she points to the box.

Eren snarls quietly under his breath. "You can't see those," he says, knocking her hand down. Her eyes widen in shock. "If it helps, I'll show my commissions to you before I hand them to my patrons, but you can't see those. Those are private."

She appears miffed. She turns up her nose. "They're morbid, is what they are."

He snorts and walks away, suddenly acutely aware of his state of dress, or rather, the lack thereof. He moves around his couch and pulls the Asian privacy screen in front of the little space he uses for a bedroom, darkening this corner of his apartment considerably. Since he lives in a studio apartment, emancipated and a senior in high school, his apartment, despite being a studio, is quite bare.

In his "bedroom", he has a twin sized bed and a small dresser with every article of clothing he owns. Many are rough fabrics without much color, faded from being scrubbed clean so many times. Most have paint stains of various colors and sizes, along with tears in the collars and the sleeves and hemlines. He reaches into the bottom drawer and pulls out his nice jeans and a solid forest green shirt. Every once in a while Zoë will become fed up with his lack of "decent" clothing and will go buy him new things herself.

He doesn't really care, just as long as she knows that he will try to keep them nice as long as he can, but they will eventually be ruined.

He tugs his ratty sneakers over his socked feet and pulls back the screen, seeing Zoë immediately. She's leaning on the kitchen counter across the apartment, her phone to her ear and a piece of laminated paper in her hand. She's talking quietly, so he walks as softly as he can, running his hands through his hair to straighten it out.

"I ordered Chinese," she announces, and he looks at her.

"What was the point of me getting showered and dressed, then?" he asks, mildly annoyed. He sits on the couch and hears her rummage around his stack of movies near the door for a second before she put into his television and sits down beside him.

"You stunk," she says unapologetically, so he smacks her arm.

She hits him back and starts up the movie, and instead of going out, they spend the night ignoring the television and throwing Chinese food at each other between conversations.

As is the case many nights, she falls asleep on top of him on the couch, and he drifts off not long after, the lights of the city outside his wall-length windows reflecting in his eyes.

…

Monday rears its ugly head the day after Sunday, something that even after seventeen years, he still finds unbearably annoying. Still, he was smart enough to follow Zoë's advice back in eighth grade, and completed all of his needed credits last semester. All he has to look forward to are his art classes and collage algebra because he failed it last year.

He scrambles out of his bed at five thirty in the morning and promptly wishes he were old enough to drink. He gets ready in a daze, hardly remembering his shower or what he put on or what he had for breakfast, if he ate at all. He doubts it. When he comes into full awareness, he's halfway to school, sitting on the bus next to Zoë, who's tapping away on her phone with some stupid game. "Welcome back, sleeping beauty," she greets, and then swears quietly when her screen flashes red and the games starts over.

He snorts and looks out the window, watching the cars roll by in silence. They look foreign and out of time, a sensation he has experienced a few times before. It seems like the world should be very different, much smaller than he knows it is. He lifts his eyes from the tar road and looks at the skyline, at the tall towers that have been standing as long as he can remember. For an instant, tall, constricting walls block the view of the sun, and the buildings are no longer there, but standing in a heap of rubble while the quiet echo of screams fill his ears.

"Are you here today? Good god, Eren. Wake the fuck up, we're here."

Zoë's voice jolts him from the scene, and he looks at her, at her annoyed face that softens when he focuses. "Text me if you head to the nurse today, Eren," she instructs quietly, helping him out of his seat.

He nods as they get off the bus, thankfully before anyone noticed. She waves to him and heads into the school entrance on the right for her advanced biology class, while he heads to the other side of the building on the left.

…

There's a new student in his math class.

That's rare, especially in high school and especially in the senior class. The teacher introduces the petite boy as Armin Arlert, and then decides to be an asshole more so than usual and gives him the seat next to Eren and tells him to get Armin caught up on everything. Eren is currently barely passing with a seventy three percent, and he wonders fleetingly why he didn't tell the seventh grade math genius in the front row to do it.

And then he gets a glimpse of Armin's enchanting cornflower blue eyes, and suddenly he doesn't mind the job too much.

…

"D-do you mind if I sit here?"

Zoë stops talking immediately. She zeros in on the speaker, but Eren doesn't bother to see who it is. The leftover Chinese is much more appealing right now, since he hasn't eaten since Wednesday, according to Zoë.

"Do you know this kid, Eren?" Zoë asks, "because I know everyone and I've never seen him before."

He glances up and catches sight of Armin, who shuffles under the scrutiny. "Go ahead," Eren gestures to the empty seat next to him, which Armin sinks into gratefully. "Zoë, meet Armin, Armin, meet Zoë. He's new in my math class and she's been my best friend for twelve years," he says, and as soon as he finishes, Armin starts speaking.

"I'm sorry if I'm intruding on something, but you're the only one who's bothered to talk to me all day and I really don't know anyone else and there's no where else to sit."

Eren is very sure Armin would have continued if Zoë didn't cut him off. "Look, it's fine," she assures. "Nothing's been interrupted, the people in your classes are clearly assholes, and you can sit here as long as you want to."

Armin blushes a bright red, and Zoë snickers. "You're cute," she tells him, and then catches him up to date briefly on their previous conversation before launching into her opinion expression once again and talking until the bell rings.

While they're gathering their things, Eren catches Armin's gaze and rolls his eyes pointedly in Zoë's direction, which makes the blond start to laugh. Zoë stares for a moment, but then lets it go.

Any other time she wouldn't have. Eren wonders what made her do so this time.

…

"Yes, I'm okay," Eren sighs into his cell phone, dipping his brush into the green paint and dragging it in swift movements across the background of the 36" x 40" inch canvas he has propped on his easel. He listens to Mikasa's lecture on how to take care of himself half-heartedly for the seven billionth time, humming in agreement at all the right moments while the majority of his attention is focused on the painting in front of him.

His sister is two years older than him and in training to go to war at a base somewhere in this country or the next one over, he isn't sure. If he's honest with himself, he doesn't really care, because that means he can slack on what he wants to slack on and paint as much as he wants. His paintings are starting to get noticed, and are beginning to go for a couple of hundred a piece. He has seven commissions lined up and half of them are nearly finished or waiting for the patron, so he can afford to not listen to his sister.

After several more promises that, yes, he's taking care, and yes, he'll remember to eat, and yes, he'll put aside his painting aside for a little while and meet new people, he hangs up the phone and throws it onto his couch.

Having no intention of doing anything of the sort, he allows himself to get lost in the colors that make up his world.

It's the key in the lock that startles him out of it. He glances at the clock and sees that six hours have passed and it's now nearing seven thirty at night. In that time, he finished another commission and set it aside to paint the picture of the crumbled and the wall that he had seen on the bus earlier that morning. Swearing, he takes the commission up from the floor and sets it on the easel in place of his other piece- another one in that personal collection Zoë is never, ever allowed to see- and takes the half-finished painting to up bed and draws the screen across the floor just as the door swings open.

Zoë, as it turns out, is not alone. Armin follows her meekly, eyes darting around Eren's apartment quickly before finding him in the back in front of the screen, covered head to toe in paint. It's a sight Zoë is familiar with, so she doesn't even blink, but Armin draws up short and blinks in surprise. Eren raises his eyebrows and then gives a little wave, wondering why the teen is here.

"I found him at the supermarket," Zoë says cheerfully, once again demonstrating her uncanny ability to read his mind without actually being aware of it. He gives her a look, _what the fuck,_ and she just grins at him. "He was alone, Eren, what was I supposed to do? I was coming over here anyway," here, she gets a fiercer look that she ignores with ease, "so I figured he could hang out with us tonight."

He sighs. If Armin weren't actually in the room, he would compare the situation to that of bringing home a cat off the streets because it looked sad, but that might hurt Armin's feelings so he doesn't. Instead he just sighs and walks over to his easel, picking up his brush along the way. "Stay over for all I care," he says, exchanging the finished commission for another one, "It's not like we don't all go to the same school anyway."

He turns and finds Armin looking at him incredulously. "What?" he asks.

"That's weird," Armin says immediately, even though it clearly wasn't what he was going to lie and say, because he flushes and looks like he might want to die.

Eren can't help it, he starts laughing, and Zoë joins in not a second later, seemingly delighted with the turn of events. Armin starts to look mildly confused, so Eren stops and shakes his head. "I've had Zoë over here for the night more times than we both can count. She practically lives here. Wherever you come from, obviously things are very different, but the offer stands if you change your mind."

"Ah, thank you?"

Eren snickers and turns back to his paints while Zoë turns the television on and goes to the kitchen to cook whatever she bought.

…

Armin comes over one evening some weeks later and he's alone. Eren is actually eating when Armin knocks at the door, so Eren opens the door with a sausage link in his mouth and a plate in his other hand. Armin snickers, and Eren spins around and resumes his place at his table defiantly.

He never realizes how hungry he is until he actually eats.

He swallows and looks at the blond, who is staring at the canvas Eren had to lean on the wall because it was too big to put on his easel. "What are you painting?"

Eren shrugs and stands, leaving his now empty plate behind. He gestures to the blank expanse wildly; staring at it while Armin watches him. "This rich dude wants some sort of Mongolian palace scene or something- I have to look over the papers to see exactly what he wants- so he can hang it in his living room."

For a second, Armin is silent, and then, "He's putting this in a living room."

"Apparently. It's not my business to care what they do with it after they pay me."

Armin snorts. "That's a nice outlook for your work."

"I think so."

They stand in companionable silence for a moment before Armin asks another question. "How are you going to get up there? Rent a ladder?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Eren says, and he reaches around the back of a canvas to pull out a belt with a lot of straps hooked onto it. Armin stares, and Eren points upward to a complicated set of wires hooked onto his ceiling. Armin stares at those too before he looks back at Eren. "Using a ladder would be way too much moving around. I just clasp these things," he holds up the belt, "around my body and only use the ladder to hook them onto the wires, and then I'm flying. It's much easier for me."

"I thought you just said not to be ridiculous."

"I never said not to be excessive."

"How does Zoë put up with you all the time?"

Here, Eren shrugs, wholly unconcerned. "Don't know, don't care. That sounds like a her-problem," he replies.

Armin bursts out laughing, and Eren is momentarily distracted by the sound and the way his heartbeat picks up when he hears it. He watches Armin for a minute, transfixed.

…

The teachers are steadily becoming downright unbearable over the next few weeks. Everything becomes about finals and collage and many students start to panic. Zoë is one of them, and she turns up at his apartment without Armin in tow for the first time in some weeks, looking entirely worn out. She sees him at his easel and promptly bursts into tears.

"Whoa!" Eren says loudly, dropping his paintbrush and his palette where he stands and ignoring how they immediately splatter over the floor and over the stands of his easel and on the hem of his pants. He rushes to her side and pulls her close, resting his chin on her head. He remembers a time when she could do this to him, and suddenly wishes for it. He has seen Zoë fall apart only a few times before, the first time when her cat died when they were seven and the last time when her father was thrown in jail for dealing two years ago. She sobs into his shirt, and he wonders what pushed her over the edge.

"It's okay," he whispers, guiding her away from the door and to the couch. "It'll be all right, okay? Tell me what happened, okay?"

She collects herself enough to cry out, "Two weeks!" before she succumbs again.

It's enough. He tightens his grip on her and recalls how Mikasa had broken down similarly when she was this close to graduating. Sentiment, he sighs inwardly. He presses a kiss into her hair and rubs his hands over her back, murmuring soothing nonsense until she manages to cry herself to sleep.

They share the couch again that night.

…

He had gotten into three art schools, looked at his paychecks and promptly abandoned the letters of acceptance. He receives lectures from Mikasa, Zoë, and Armin for doing this, but then asks them, "How can I be happy losing time doing what I love to learn how to do things I've already mastered?"

They quiet down, but Mikasa continually drops hints about going to one of those schools in her phone calls for the next few days leading up to graduation. He hears them, loud and clear, and ignores them.

The prices for his work reach just over a thousand when he receives his diploma. Mikasa isn't there. He shreds the letters.

…

"Looks like Zoë bailed on us again," Armin says conversationally, some months later.

"Her loss," Eren says in return, leaning over Armin to get to the various orange and red paints to find the ones he looking for. Armin leans back in his seat to allow it, looking outside to the city and the setting sun.

"Why don't you ever paint this?" Armin questions, and Eren glances over his shoulder at him, eyebrows raised. Armin gestures at the city, which they can see clearly through the clean glass. "I've seen you paint everything from fruit to people to landscapes to fantasy, but I've never seen you paint the city."

Locating the paints he was looking for, Eren rights himself again and pours the paint onto his palette, dipping his brush into it and running the color through the horizon line and just under and above it to create the image of a sunrise about to happen. His brush slips and he growls, automatically sticking the paintbrush between his teeth to run his fingers over the mistake, blending it quickly to make it disappear. Because the colors are so dark and not really dry yet, it goes quickly, but he knows where it was and it bugs him.

Remembering Armin's question, he pulls the paintbrush free and cleans it in the water, the color staining it bright. "I don't know," he answers. "I guess the city doesn't really do it for me," he says it absently, already losing himself in the forests that he's painting. Almost as an instinct, he paints it so that a few of the tree branches are broken and doesn't question it, but Armin always questions everything. It's like he's starved for knowledge, like he'll drown without it.

Eren is perfectly content in his little prison, as Zoë calls it.

The word prison jolts in his mind and the paintbrush drops from his fingers, and he can't hear Armin breaking off his questions about the painting, changing his tone to that oh-my-god-what-the-hell tone that means people are about to panic as he asks Eren if he's okay, what's happened?

He can't hear anything but the roaring in his ears and he can't see anything but the painted forest and how he is almost falling into it. He turns, and nearly cries out when he finds large, impossibly high eyes boring right into his. No human being is that big, he thinks vaguely, and another word passes through his mind, different from the one he had immediately thought, but somehow much more fitting despite the rest of the world's perceptions. _Titan_ , a voice whispers, and he swears before he blacks out.

…

He wakes with a cry, eyes wide open, not really seeing anything but hearing someone swear and hearing a loud clamor. Moments later he feels several people touching him and pinning him down, talking to him, but don't they understand that's useless?

He slams down on the bed, completely spent, chest heaving. His vision clears and he sees an unfamiliar ceiling and can finally register the sound of slowing beeps that grow softer with every passing breath. What the hell, he wonders, looking around. He sees Zoë standing next to the bed, brown eyes wide and light brown hair tangled around her shoulders. He can't remember the last time he's seen her with her hair down. Armin is standing next to her, looking so sad that Eren wants nothing more than to kiss the look right off him. It's not a new feeling, but not a good one to have right now, so he tears his eyes away, gazing over nurses and a doctor before he sees his final visitor.

Mikasa looks different than how he remembers her, but he supposes that's to be expected. It's been just over three years since they were in a hundred kilometers of each other, after all. She's standing perfectly straight, perfectly without emotion, but she used to do the latter all the time anyway. She's in a military uniform, her gun strapped to her hip, and three pins on her left breast pocket that he can't identify. Her black hair is longer, nearly concealing the red scarf wound around her neck. Something in him relaxes when he sees it, the red cloth hand knitted by their late mother and given to Eren when he was six, before they adopted Mikasa and he gave it to her three years later.

Ever perceptive, Mikasa knows instantly when his eyes fall on her. She stiffens, and all she says to him is, "You idiot," before she stalks out of the room.

Questioningly, he looks at his friends before he looks to the doctor when they give no indication of being any help at all, the bastards. "You're terribly malnourished," the doctor explains gently, "and you collapsed from starvation yesterday evening. Had you been alone, the situation would have been much more dire. According to your history, this is a problem that is self-inflicted for the majority of your life."

He knows what she'll say next and he cuts her off. "I don't eat because I forget to half the time, and the other half of the time it feels like there wouldn't be enough. I feel like I live off of rations, not because of anorexia or any other eating disorder you can think of," he snarls, annoyed. Her unsurprised and uncaring look serves only to annoy him further.

"Regardless," she says, and starts rattling off a whole bunch of different treatments for an eating disorder that he has no intention of following, but pretends to listen to all the same.

He's released later that night, and the first thing he does when he gets back home is lock Zoë, Armin, and Mikasa out of his apartment and pick up his brush and an empty canvas.

He hears them call from outside the door, but he ignores them, and paints until the sun comes back around, this time actually painting the monsters that lurk in his nightmares and seeing them come to life before his eyes.

Eren manages to go through six canvases before a sudden lack of green paint drives him from his apartment. Zoë had to go to work and Mikasa was called back to the base, but Armin is waiting for him with silent words that weigh too heavily in the air.

…

Weeks turn to months and he forces himself to eat whenever people are around, just to appease them. The reality of it is, he doesn't really care, but they do, and if keeps them happy, they'll leave him to his own devices so he can get back to work.

Otherwise, his brief stint in the hospital is swept under the rug and never seen again.

For that, he's glad.

…

It's the winter holidays before everything starts to crumble around him.

The problem with Armin is that he's mostly so quiet Eren forgets he's there sometimes. He'll ask copious amounts of questions when it's later in the evening, but during the day, the blond has no problem just resting quietly on the couch in perfect line of sight of both the city and of Eren and his work. He can't count how many of the personal paintings he's done, thinking he's alone, only to turn around and find Armin staring at him with those eyes and oh dear god. He can never decide if he'd rather ravish the blond or kill him when he sees him there like that.

And one evening, Armin asks a question, as he's wont to do, and Eren drops his paintbrush in surprise as he swings round to face him, heart racing. "What?" he asks, wetting his lips.

Patiently, Armin repeats his question. It speaks volumes about how well they've gotten to know one another in the past year. "Why do you only paint those things when you think you're alone and why does no one ever see them again?"

Eren turns back to his painting, taking it in. The house is a crumbled mess, and there's a woman crippled under the pressure of a large stone. There's blood all over the ground, on the woman, on the rubble. It's a somber image, and as Zoë had pointed out the first and last time she had seen this collection, a morbid one. His heart aches with grief when he lays eyes on the woman, when he sees the tears on her face, the picture of desolation.

He wonders what happened and what she's running from, but then thinks back to his previous works and knows that for every painting in this collection, there are a thousand more that will pop up and have the same message: _Running from the end of humanity._

And then he thinks about how the world exceeded seven billion people and wonders why he could think of such things as memories rather than fictional ideas.

"It's personal," he says. Armin says no more, and neither does he. Instead they curl up in each other on the couch and watch some lame movie and fall asleep wrapped in each other's arms.

…

Their first kiss is totally, completely unexpected, but Eren is okay with that.

They are at some party- Eren didn't listen to the details when Zoë had relayed them- and there's mistletoe in the doorway. There's no one else around, but he and Armin are stuck anyway, and Eren throws caution into the wind and kisses Armin the way he's been wanting to for nearly a year. Armin kisses back with the same fervor, throwing his arms around Eren's neck. Eren backs them up until Armin hits the wall, and he knows that they will be leaving very, very soon.

He pulls away and tugs on Armin's hand, ignoring the blond's whine of protest at the loss. "Come on," is all he says, and Armin follows willingly. Eren guides them through people and out the door, taking an immediate right to head to the subway station. Armin folds himself into Eren's side while they're walking, and they're holding hands while Eren has one arm around Armin's shoulders.

The ride back to Eren's apartment would take too long, Armin insists, so he buys the tickets for a train leading into the opposite side of the city, a place he hasn't been to since a month after his mother died and he emancipated himself from his father when he was fifteen and Mikasa had just turned eighteen. Going back makes him uneasy, but it's late at night on a holiday so Armin kisses him thoroughly all the way over.

Holding the smaller body to him, blond strands tickling his face and soft lips on his own, he supposes that going to an unfriendly place is totally worth it.

Armin lives alone, apparently. Eren wonders as to why for only a second before Armin hushes him and they fall into Armin's bedroom, the air steadily getting thicker. Eren looks down at Armin, who stares back up at him, completely trusting and open. Armin nods, and so they waste no more time.

…

Eren has only had one-night stands before, so the experience of waking up next to someone while the sunlight pours through windows is a surreal one. He whines when the light is way too bright against his eyelids and moves to turn over, only to find himself with a mouthful of hair. Pulling back, he finds his right arm paralyzed by the other person and that the other person is, in fact, Armin. He blinks for a second, mentally going over his current position, how their legs are entwined under the blankets and how right it feels to have the other young adult in his arms like this.

Feeling content, he lies back down and closes his eyes.

He doesn't get to rest for long.

Armin stirs maybe five minutes later, and lets out a squeak as soon as he realizes that he's in bed with someone. Eren blinks open his eyes and smiles when he immediately sees that cornflower blue he's been falling in love with. "Hi," he says.

Armin seems mildly disoriented, so he blinks in mystification before he mutters a greeting back. He squirms out of Eren's hold and sits up, hair completely disheveled and drowsiness lining every line of his body. He winces as he rights himself, and Eren feels a strike of guilt, but Armin doesn't seem to mind too much. He stands and heads into an adjacent room, probably a bathroom. Eren lies there for a moment before he stands and follows. The shower turns on.

…

"I thought you lived with your parents or something."

"My parents are dead."

Armin says it coolly, like it's just a simple fact and not something that should bring him sadness. Eren can understand family issues, but even he feels pain when he thinks of how his family tore themselves apart.

"Really?" he asks, and Armin nods.

"Yeah. They just up and left about a year before I came here, and so I moved here to live with my grandfather, but he died a few months ago, just before graduation, and so now I'm living here alone."

And Eren would be damned if he knew what to make of that. "Sorry," is all he can say, but Armin doesn't seem too sorry at all. He just shrugs and hands Eren a coffee cup without another word.

…

"It's about damn time," Zoë says nonchalantly, later, when she just walks into Eren's apartment and catches Eren and Armin kissing on the couch.

Armin jumps, but Eren just takes the opportunity to leave a hickey on the blond's neck, and watches from the corner of his eyes how Zoë wrinkles her nose in distaste. "I do not need to see this," she tells them.

"Get out then," Eren retorts, trailing his lips upward to recapture Armin's.

But Zoë doesn't leave. Instead she sits on the other side of the couch and turns the television on, leaving them to it. Armin's tense in Eren's arms, but a few quick kisses take care of that.

…

"I'm surprised you haven't painted Armin yet," Zoë tells him later.

"Hmmm?" Eren questions, exchanging his brush for another and wiping some paint onto his jeans.

"Armin," Zoë repeats, and that makes Eren pause.

"What about him?"

She throws her head back and groans. "You're impossible!" she cries. "Why haven't you painted your boyfriend yet? I know you've painted me and your sister a few times, but I've never seen one of him."

He furrows his eyebrows. "I think I have painted him before," he tells her, his mind running back over his work. Devastated and desperate blue eyes come to mind, dated back a few weeks before he even met Armin, and his breath freezes in his chest. Unthinkingly, he races to his bedroom and flings the privacy screen aside, dropping to his knees beside the bed. He can vaguely hear Zoë call his name, but he ignores her and pulls three boxes out from under the bed, all labeled, _Private Collection_.

He looks briefly through the first one, hundreds of colorful canvases being touched by his fingertips for the first time in many years. Unsuccessful, he moves to the next one and thumbs through those as well. He stumbles across it in the last few, and pulls it out with reverence and care.

"Oh my god," Zoë says distantly, and he can see why. The date in the corner is from nearly two years ago now, and he can recall waking up in the middle of the night for the first time in several months, the need to paint this picture thrumming in his veins like he was being electrocuted.

The painting is an exact liking of Armin. There a few differences, like the way his hair isn't nearly as straight cut, like some of it had been pulled or that he had split ends. Another is his dirty skin, covered with small flecks of something like plaster and blood flecks and some kind of slime. But the biggest differences are his teary eyes, dulled by pain but alight with devastation. It's a haunting sight, and Eren doesn't know why he had painted it this way. He can't remember.

"Oh my god, Eren," Zoë repeats, and he nods. "Why?"

He knows what she's asking, but he doesn't know the answer. He doesn't stop her when she looks through the last box, pulling out dozens of paintings, all of them with the same haunting, desperate emotion that the one he has in his arms holds. She repeats her question over and over, and he just shakes his head. He doesn't know. He doesn't know.

…

Mikasa and Armin come over the next evening for New Year's, and Eren sits numbly on the couch as Zoë leaps at the chance to show them the paintings. They had uncovered several more in hidden places that Eren himself had forgotten about, and Zoë seemed more distressed as the hours ticked by and she got her first look at his collection.

Unfortunately, his sister and boyfriend seem to have similar reactions. Mikasa was not happy to find some of her, both as a child and older, decorated with blood with fierce determination lining her face. Zoë had seen some of a woman in a green uniform just like the rest of them, with glasses she didn't have, and a childish, sadistic enjoyment on her face as she was swinging deadly blades at something unseen. Armin's only reaction was a tightening of his jaw and to sit next to Eren in silence.

And now, all four of them sit on the floor with the paintings spread around them. Eren feels sick- never before has someone seem so many pieces of himself, and now, all of them are laid bare on the floor, free for the three closest people in his life to examine at their leisure. Armin had seen only the ones of forests or other landscapes, never the ones with the soldiers killing and dying at the hands of giant monsters depicted in only one of his paintings.

"It feels like memories," he tells them, staring at his own work and wondering how those words could possibly by the truth. Yet, that's what they were.

"You told me before not to be ridiculous," Armin says quietly. Eren huffs a laugh, and shakes his head in response.

"Is this why you don't eat?" Mikasa's voice startles him, and he glances over at her to see a picture of a line of people waiting for rations. All of them are thin, too thin, and broken and sad. Almost against his will, he finds himself nodding, and the three of them exhale a breath, like something has just been realized.

"Maybe a past life," Zoë inputs, and Mikasa shrugs while Armin turns wide eyes to her and Eren can't tear his gaze from the people in a line. He can't remember painting that one, but his signature is on the bottom and the date reads of sometime during his first year in high school. High school seems so distant now. It's barely been seven months since he and his friends graduated though.

Armin shakes his head, ever the history fanatic, for whatever reason. "There is no record of anything like this, anywhere. I think if people had ever been this- ah, desperate- we would have some stories about it, by word of mouth if nowhere else."

"Maybe they wanted to forget," Zoë says gently, gesturing around. "This is a deciduous forest, which is all around the world. Maybe this was just a small population of people cut off from the rest of the world. Who knows?" She shrugs. "But this feels like memories to me too. We can't really dismiss that."

Armin seems frustrated, but Mikasa's pager goes off at that moment, and she looks at them apologetically. "I'll ask around," she tells them, standing. "I'll be quiet about it, but maybe someone would know something. I think we can all feel an eerie familiarity to these, and that can't be just brushed aside. But I deal with dozens of people, and I think I even recognize a few of them," here, she nudges on of a short man with dark eyes and hair that is wearing the same green uniform and a scowl, "in my division."

She starts to walk away, but rests a hand on Eren's shoulder as she passes in a silent comfort. "It'll be okay," she says quietly, and then slips out the door.

…

Once more, weeks turn to months and those months become a year. Mikasa has started a tour in Iraq and can't talk to them as often as she used to, but always says that other people are recognizing that feeling she describes to them. She picks her confidants carefully, but her caution means it's slow going. Eren doesn't really mind. He's happy taking commissions and doing some work that doesn't involve his private collection but is original and not requested.

Zoë goes to the local college for her first two years of credits before she'll move to a university. She stops by once or twice a week, instead of the nightly visits he used to have during their high school years and "break year". It's quieter, and for a while Eren is unhappy with the development, but Armin turns that around fast enough.

It's February, a year after that awful New Years celebration before Armin finally agrees to move in with Eren. Eren's overjoyed.

And so Eren finds himself unpacking boxes in the middle of February when it's cold and snowing and he really should be working on that commission that's due next week. Never mind, he tells himself, watching Armin walk into the apartment with snow in his hair and his cheeks flushed from the cold. Eren takes Armin into his arms kisses him hard, and when they pull apart, Armin asks what that was all about and all Eren can say is, "I love you."

Armin's look of surprise melts into something softer, and he reaches up to put his arms around Eren's neck and he repeats the sentiment with a whisper and a kiss.

…

It's Armin that remembers everything first, much to the shock of everyone else. He wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, and when Eren finally brings him back into the here and the now, Armin's eyes are older, they're changed, and they look so much like the boy in the painting that Eren's heart breaks.

They never return to normal, but Armin starts to tell Eren that one day, he'll understand.

…

Zoë comes into the apartment in the middle of the day, wailing about someone called "Sonny" and someone else called "Bean" and for the first time Eren is not able to provide any comfort for his best friend at all. Armin takes that job; guiding Zoë out the door with promises that he'll be back and everything will be okay and Eren really starts to feel like he's missing something very, very important.

He couldn't say what.

…

Mikasa's tour finishes in October, she tells him. She's got a nasty cut on her right cheek, the sight of which makes him feel like killing something _\- because how dare someone hurt his sister_ \- but she insists it's only a scratch and the bullet could have gone throw her brain had she been a nanosecond later in her reflexive dodge that had come from nowhere. This reassurance does nothing to calm him down.

Someone moves behind her in her Skype call, someone he knows, but she quickly says goodbye and all he can see is the flash of dark eyes that he swears used to look at him with contempt and had stood over him and beat him once.

Armin is quick to redirect his attention, suddenly kissing him hard and pulling him to the bedroom, and that works for a little while, but when Armin is curled up against him, sound asleep, and he's staring at his darkened ceiling, he has that same feeling again.

…

An hour ago, he would've said that he'd outgrown this shit.

He sits up with a cry, startling Armin from sleep and waking Zoë in the living area.

It takes him a while to calm down, and it's no wonder, really. Because yeah, those people had wanted to forget and there are no records of it because of that but who the fuck would want to remember giant beings that eat people alive?

Zoë- Hange, he remembers she used to be called- stumbles in, and regardless of the relationship they used to have, she's still his best friend and has been for fifteen years in this life, so she sits close to him on the bed and leans her head on his shoulder while Armin wraps his arms around his waist and starts to whisper nonsense to calm him down.

An hour ago, he would've said that he'd outgrown this shit.

But he didn't remember the Titans an hour ago.

…

He's not sure if it's a relief to see Levi, Erwin, Marco, Annie, Jean, Sasha, Connie, and Historia turn up in various places over the next few years or not.

It takes time, but they all remember eventually. Levi and Erwin had remembered before they met Mikasa, who had regained her memory when she was nearly shot. Not the best circumstances, Levi had conceded, but it had helped them out quite a bit because she became quite the weapon practically over night.

It's November, five years after he remembered, and he has more people in his apartment than he's ever had in his life. Lives, he jokes quietly in his head, looking over the people and then to the city skyline. For the first time, he actually considers painting it. It's a sight he'd never thought he'd see, after all.


End file.
